Yes, but don't link to it from your home page. It's for search engines not visitors.

I like Patrick's answer and agree that you need enough words to be able to orient visitors and search engines. While there is no best practice minimum, I personally aim for at least 100 words.

I noticed some big drops in the sites I monitor this update as well, yet rankings and traffic are business as usual.

Patrick's link is helpful as are other's comments. The other thing I'd suggest is to monitor traffic, rankings and webmaster tools to make sure nothing is seriously wrong. If nothing arouses your suspicion, wait for the next update. This one was smaller than the last, root domains down by almost 10%. If you have a site with few incoming link sources, you're going to be more susceptible to sampling fluctuations.

No, you're absolutely right Patrick. The answer is, an external site (emphasis on "site") can pass link equity to more than one page on your site. An external page can too, provided those links are pointing to different pages on the recipient site.

If, for example, Site A has a footer link that points to Site B's home page, those links will be devalued or penalized by Google because they're unnatural and rarely viewed or clicked on by users. If Site A feels compelled to use them, they should be nofollowed, effectively telling Google you're not trying to game the system.

If, on the other hand, Site A has a unique link on Page X that points to Site B, AND it adds value, AND it's a follow link, then it will pass value. If Site A has two identical outgoing links on the same page or if one of those links is identifical except for the anchor text, then only the first will pass value.

If site A has unique links on Page X that point to different pages on Site B, AND they add value, AND they are follow links, then they will pass value.

Edited now that I've seen Patrick's response which I agree with and want to elaborate on a bit.

"... if an external site has more than one link going to your site, then it is only the one link that passes value. " There has been some discussion of that point in the past. This is the most recent I found and I believe it is still accurate.

Moz best practices for anchor text also touch on your point.

1. Yes, but it the anchor text of the first link that will count most.

_2) _Yes, because the link destinations are different.

3) It's possible those links will boost rankings indirectly IF they provide sticky traffic, not not by virtual of the links themselves. Sticky traffic is traffic that doesn't bounce.

Well I'm glad to hear you've had a traffic increase at least!

We're seeing different things at Majestic. I'm seeing 124 different domains with deleted links. Examples include:

<colgroup><col width="470"></colgroup>
| http://blog.sellingpower[dot]com/ |
| http://www.honeywellaidc[dot]com/en-US/partners/Pages/find-a-partner.aspx |
| http://www.sellingpower.typepad[dot]com/ |
| http://www.dcvelocity[dot]com/whitepapers/ |
| http://spectrumsuppliermarketplace[dot]com/Listing/Index/Printing__Surface_Treatment/Bar_Coding/3497/681 |
| http://www.thomasnet[dot]com/products/barcode-labels-42422006-1.html |
| http://www.business[dot]com/technology/electronics/ |
| http://www.supplychain247[dot]com/company/supply_chain_services |
| http://fc.webmasterpro.de/stat.php?name=hotelab&source=referer |

I agree the purchasingandsupplysourcingguide link is active. I see that as well.

"A_nd I run my report against the same competitors every month but theirs actually increased_."  Sorry, here I don't know what report you're referencing. Are you saying you run Moz reports each month that tells you the number of links you and your competitors have? I thought Moz used Open Site Explorer data for that - the same data we're talking about so can't speak to that.

Lastly, yes - none of the tools are 100% accurate. They're all based on sampling and projections. Yes, I agree Moz estimates tend to be lower than other sources of link data.  I really think the reason you're seeing such a huge variation in link counts is because of the small number of sources you have for incoming links and the relatively small sample size Moz uses to make it's projections. I agree 80% is huge, but from what I can see in Majestic, you've lost 60% (124 of 198) of your link sources recently so that would explain it, at least partially.

That's the best I can come up with Ken.

I'm not trying to be slippery here Ken, there are just so many factors to consider.

If you're talking about supplychainservices.com, I plugged it into a third link tool (MajesticSEO) and was told you have 4,195 backlinks from 198 different source domains. 124 of those sources are reporting deleted links, so it would seem to make sense that your numbers are dropping.

Different tools are always going to give you different numbers because their methods, sampling tools and timings differ. I find Webmaster tools tends to report the highest numbers.

If you've been seeing 15,000+ total links to your website in Moz for months, it could be that there was only one update to the Moz metrics in that time period. Moz data only gets updated about every 4-8 weeks, so your numbers are going to be static in between updates. (Here's the update schedule and history.) Depending on the sample size, the numbers could drop dramatically between updates especially given the small number of source domains you have linking to you with active links.

If you want a download of the MajesticSEO links, private message me and I'll forward them to you.

I just want to chime in on the "most people don't bother to consult sitemaps  - if they need to consult it to find their way on your site you probably have a UX problem" statement.

I agree, but a lot of sites DO have a UX problem, and for that reason I use HTML sitemaps. If you're in a hurry, and let's face it, everyone is, you can go directly to the HTML sitemap and search for whatever it is you're looking for. And yes, a lot of sites still DON'T have search either b/c they think their UX is fine and therefore don't need search. Can't tell you how many times I've had that conversation with site developers....